In a recent article , I talked about how Ethanol is not a solution to our energy needs. It's not "green" by any rational sense of the word and it's not practical and it's expensive. I get a lot of email and this article produced more than its fair share as proponents of bio-diesel, solar, wind, and so forth got into the act. A lot of the emails had a central theme "So what's YOUR solution then???" There is no easy solution. A lot of solutions involve replacing one environmen...
In the past year or so we've seen more and more people jump onto the Ethanol bandwagon. After learning more about it (and it doesn't take very long to do some basic research) I've concluded that Ethanol advocates are idiots. Let me be very clear: If you think Ethanol is a serious alternative fuel you either haven't researched it at all or you are too dumb to be expressing opinions. It's actually difficult to find a "plus" to Ethanol. I guess, in theory, it would reduce depen...
Maybe I'm starting to get old or something but I'm ready for a vacation. Since last Summer, I've only had a scattering of days off (all pre-determined holidays). This Winter we finished up GalCiv II: Dark Avatar which involved a couple of all-nighters and massive hours. So I definitely have the time. I have 13 personal days (I used 2 to go up North a couple weeks ago) plus around 10 make up days from weekends and extra hours put in. I'll never end up using them al...
Watching PBS show on Jeff Skilling, the main guy behind Enron's corruption and describing his beliefs and showing interviews with him. Oye is this guy literally my polar opposite. He believes ideas are king. He feels people should be rewarded on ideas alone and execution of those ideas is left for the lesser beings of the world. It was that philosphy that was Enron's undoing. Their switch to mark to market accounting is based on booking as profit deals as they are pinned. So if you ...
As a kid, I was afraid of bees. I mean, hysterically afraid. To be fair, I probably had good reason, I'd been stung hundreds of times by the time I was 12. I grew up next to a swamp and was constantly getting stung by bees, hornets, wasps, etc. Admittedly, most of the stings were due to my own idiocy. Okay, nearly all were due to idiocy. One time, after getting stung when I was 8, I "declared war" on the big wasp nest and attacked it with a stick. The wasps won....
Our resident "Colonel" is always advocating increases in the federal income tax rate. What he doesn't realize is that federal income tax rates hurt the very people that he wants to help. The government gets its money through a variety of sources. But mostly it comes from income taxes, payroll taxes, and corporate taxes. But income taxes have multiple types within them: WAGES & CAPITAL GAINS. Wages are taxed anywhere from 10% to 35% depending on how much you make. But capita...
One part of the "AI" isn't really AI. A lot of people think of the trade screen in the game as being "AI". But it's not. It's basically just a dialog full of weighted values. The real AI may, for instance, call up the trade screen. But the actual valuing of items in the trade screen (money, techs, ships, planets, etc.) isn't in my area (the AI) but is instead just a table of values to weight everything. Which means, of course, that it's exploitable. Creating a negotia...
Using Google Images it's amazing what you can find on the net. Here are some: Cartoon version of Brad Wardell from PC Magazine Photo picture of Brad Wardell from Detroit News Another picture of Brad Wardell from the Detroit News Brad Wardell at office (I'm using my name in the captions to get these better indexed for the future)
Up north our cottage is nearly done. It should be totally done by the first of June. We're pretty excited. Here are some pictures of the latest progress: Beach in front of cottage Unifnished great room and fireplace Upstairs cat walk Wintery outside A view from the dining room. A view from the upstairs window
Up north our cottage is nearly done. It should be totally done by the first of June. We're pretty excited. Here are some pictures of the latest progress: Beach in front of cottage Unifnished great room and fireplace Upstairs cat walk Wintery outside A view from the dining room. A view from the upstairs window
Every so often some journalist somewhere feels the need to do one of those "Why the United States should be more like <country X>" articles. This year it was US News & World Report. Entitled, " What the US can learn from the rest of the world" the article implies we're in decline or, at best falling behind with the rest of the world. In my experience, most countries with democratically elected governments that have reasonably free markets end up with the environment that its...
Until the Great Depression, minimum wage laws were consistently struck down by the Supreme Court. Using the 14th amendment as their basis, the supreme court's position was that the government did not have the power to regulate contracts between employer and employee. The Great Depression caused them to take a fresh look at this and the result were state minimum wage laws. Over time, the federal government itself got into the act and now we have national minimum wage laws and state on...
The first beta of 1.6 is purely fixes and performance improvements. The new features and game balance tweaks will come in subsequent betas. That said, these changes are pretty significant. First off, the defense handling has been changed which should have far-reaching consequences to how the game is played. Secondly, the new ship stacking handling should increase performance as there's now much smarter drawing routines for ships which should greatly improve performance for ...
It's not easy being a gamer who also makes games. I wish I didn't love computer games so much. But I do. What's worse, I like a particular type of computer games that seems to be increasingly ignored even though I am certain there are markets for those games. What that means is that both my desire as a gamer to make a game and my evil capitalistic goal to do something about that desire combine together. I remember being told by two major publishers back before the first Galact...
This next week we hope to release the first of the 1.6 Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar betas. This will be the first major update since release as we look through feedback to see what new features we can look at adding, what play balancing we can do, and what sorts of game play issues we need to address. One of the requirements we've made is to make the game run a lot faster on lower end hardware. We have this working internally and the results should be pretty significant ...